Backward Edge Pointer Protection Technology Based on Dynamic Instrumentation

Abstract

Buffer overflow is an important security issue. Many countermeasures have been proposed, e.g., DEP, shadow stack. However, existing DEP is facing the problem of being bypassed by attackers through information leakage attacks. To address the shortcomings of current backward edge pointer integrity protection in preventing buffer overflow attacks, this paper proposes a shadow stack based backward edge pointer integrity protection scheme through dynamic instrumentation, and implements a prototype system based on the DynamoRIO framework. Shadow stack mechanism can achieve effective protection for return address integrity by maintaining a one-to-one mapping relationship between the shadow stack and the program stack. Meanwhile, test cases were designed to evaluate the effectiveness, runtime performance and compatibility of the plugin. Experiment results show that the security plugin is compatible with most programs and can run with an average overhead of about 10% to 15%. This is acceptable when comparing to stack shield with 22% overhead.